An Assistive Photo Capture System for Pre- and Post-operative Analysis of Facial Reconstructive Surgeries

It is common for facial reconstructive surgeons to take pre- and post-operative images from patients to keep track of their healing progress. However, current guidelines only focus on hardware and lighting setup. Therefore, most pre- and post-operative images are taken from different perspectives. This makes them not suitable for quantitative analysis such as comparing with simulation results, as it is very difficult to compare paths and distances in two two-dimensional face photos taken from vastly different perspectives. To address this issue, we propose an application to ensure the pre- and post-operative images are taken from the same perspective. We build a mobile application where we first record the face pose of the pre-operative image. When taking the post-operative image, we compare the face pose of the current frame with the pre-operative pose and only take a photo when the difference is below a threshold. We performed a comparison study of taking post-operative images with the proposed application and the phone camera on six head models. Experimental results show that the alignment error for the proposed application is only 1/3 of that of the phone camera, proving the effectiveness of our system.